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(17,000 words)
LRB, Vol. 41 No. 3 · 7 February 2019
Bolsonaro’s Brazil
by Perry Anderson
I: Lula/Dilma
The teratology of the contemporary political imagination – plentiful
enough: Trump, Le Pen, Salvini, Orbán, Kaczyński, ogres galore – has
acquired a new monster. Rising above the ruck, the president-elect of
Brazil has extolled his country’s most notorious torturer; declared that
its military dictatorship should have shot thirty thousand opponents;
told a congresswoman she was too ugly to merit raping; announced he
would rather a son killed in a car accident than gay; declared open
season on the Amazon rainforest; not least, on the day after his
election, promised followers to rid the land of red riff-raff. Yet for
Sérgio Moro, his incoming justice minister saluted worldwide as an
epitome of judicial independence and integrity, Jair Bolsonaro is a
‘moderate’.
To all appearances, the verdict of the polls last October was
unambiguous: after governing the country for 14 years, the Workers’
Party (PT) has been comprehensively repudiated and its survival may now
be in doubt. Lula, the most popular ruler in Brazilian history, has been
incarcerated by Moro and awaits further jail sentences. His successor,
evicted from office midway through her second term, is a virtual
outcast, reduced to a humiliating fourth place in a local Senate race.
How has this reversal come about? To what extent was it contingent or at
some point a foregone conclusion? What explains the radicalism of the
upshot? By comparison with the scale of the upheaval through which
Brazil has lived in the last five years, and the gravity of its possible
outcome, the histrionics over Brexit in this country and the conniptions
over Trump in America are close to much ado about nothing.
Brazilian politics are Italianate in character: intricate and
serpentine. But there is little hope of grasping what has befallen the
country without some understanding of them. When Lula left office in
2010 – presidents in Brazil are limited to two successive terms, though
not barred from subsequent re-election – the economy posted 7.5 per cent
growth, poverty had been cut in half, new universities had multiplied,
inflation was low, the budget and current account were in surplus and
his approval ratings above 80 per cent. To succeed him, Lula picked his
chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, in the 1960s a fighter in the
underground against the military dictatorship, who had never held or run
for electoral office before. With Lula at her side, she coasted to
victory with a 56 per cent majority, the first woman to win the
presidency. Initially better received by a middle class that detested
Lula, for two years she enjoyed quite widespread esteem for a show of
calm and competence. But her inheritance was less rosy than it seemed.
High commodity prices had underlain Lula’s boom, without altering
Brazil’s historically low rates of investment and productivity growth.
Virtually as soon as Dilma took office in 2011, they started to fall,
bringing growth abruptly down to 1.9 per cent by 2012. In 2013 the US
Federal Reserve announced it would stop buying bonds, setting off a
so-called ‘taper tantrum’ in capital markets, drawing foreign finance
out of Brazil. The balance of payments deteriorated. Inflation picked
up. The years of buoyant prosperity were over.
Politically, a mortgage lay on the PT government from the start. After
the re-democratisation of the country in the late 1980s, three parties
loomed largest: on the centre right, the fig-leaf ‘social democratic’
PSDB, home of big business and the middle class; in the centre, the
theoretically ‘democratic’ PMDB, a sprawling network of clientelism in
rural and small-town settings, feathering local nests with federal or
provincial largesse; on the left, the PT, the only party that was more
than a collection of regional notables and their underlings. Alongside
this trio, however, in Brazil’s system of open-list proportional
representation in very large constituencies, a plethora of smaller
parties of no ideological orientation proliferated: contraptions for
extracting public funds and favours for their leaders, proliferated. In
these conditions, no president has ever led a party with more than a
quarter of the seats in a Congress through which all significant
legislation must pass, making coalitions a condition of government and
distribution of lucrative prebends a condition of coalitions.
For twenty years, the presidency was held by only two parties, the PSDB
and the PT. The former, committed to delivering what it called a
salutary ‘shock of capitalism’ to the country, had little difficulty
finding allies among the traditional oligarchies of the north-east and
the eternal predators of the PMDB. They were natural allies for a
liberal-conservative regime. When Lula came to power, the PT did not
want to depend on them. Instead it set out to build a majority in
Congress from the morass of smaller parties, each more venal than the
next. To avoid giving them too many ministries, the customary financial
reward for support, it doled out monthly cash payments under the
counter. When this system, the so-called mensalão, was exposed in 2005,
it looked for a time as if it might bring down the government. But Lula
remained popular among the poor, and by shedding key aides and switching
to a more conventional reliance on the PMDB to secure majorities in
Congress, he survived the uproar and in due course was triumphantly
re-elected. By his second term, the PMDB was a stable brace of his
administration, enjoying in exchange a swathe of satisfactory
nominations, central and local, in the machinery of government. When the
term came to an end, the PMDB speaker in the Lower Chamber, Michel
Temer, was chosen by Lula to be vice president under Dilma, yoking a
veteran of backroom carve-up and corridor intrigue to a political tyro.
The economic bequests detonated first. By 2013, the middle classes had
soured on the government and rising prices were causing popular tension
in the big cities. Lula had pumped money – higher minimum wages, cheaper
credit, cash transfers – for the poor into private consumption, not
public services, most of which remained dire. In the winter, higher bus
fares ignited protests led by young left-wing activists in São Paulo.
Police crackdowns amplified them into massive street demonstrations
throughout Brazil. With increasing right-wing participation and backing
from the country’s powerful establishment media, they swiftly became a
free-for-all against politicians in general and the PT in particular. In
a fortnight Dilma’s approval ratings dropped from 57 to 30 per cent.
Combining spending cuts and further, inexpensive welfare measures, she
recovered ground over the next months. But in the summer of 2014, buried
political mines began to explode. Federal police taps on
money-laundering operations in a Brasília car wash – lava jato –
revealed widespread corruption in the giant state oil company Petrobras,
which at the time boasted one of the largest stock valuations in the
world. A stream of leaks from the investigation, blared crescendo by the
media, indicated connections to the PT going back to Lula’s time. These
resonated in an already highly charged atmosphere, a consequence of the
public trial in late 2012 – seven years after the fact – of the party’s
leading actors in the mensalão affair.
So when Dilma ran for re-election in 2014, she faced a far more
aggressive opposition than in 2010. As before, it was the PSDB candidate
who reached the second round of the presidential contest against her. In
a combative but clumsy campaign, in which she performed poorly in
debate, Dilma achieved a narrow majority on a pledge never to accept the
austerity she accused her opponent of planning to inflict on the
population. Before even taking office, she was in difficulty. Perhaps
thinking to repeat Lula’s opening gambit on first becoming president,
when he began with strict economic orthodoxy to reassure markets,
expanding social expenditure only after he had consolidated public
finances, she picked a Chicago-trained bank executive for finance
minister to signal a new frugality and betrayed her campaign promises
with a conventional retrenchment that hit popular incomes. Having
alienated her left, she antagonised her right by attempting to prevent
the PMDB from continuing to hold the powerful position, vacated by Temer
in 2010, of Speaker of the House, on whose co-operation passage of
legislation generally depended, only to be roundly defeated by the
party’s victorious candidate, Eduardo Cunha. The PT, which had won just
13 per cent of the vote for Congress, was now extremely vulnerable in
the legislature.
The PSDB, meanwhile, had not taken its defeat for the presidency lying
down. Furious at being baulked of a triumph on which he had counted,
their leader Aécio Neves lodged charges of illegal expenditure against
the winning ticket with the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, hoping to get
the result cancelled and a new poll instituted, in which – given popular
disillusion with Dilma’s economic course – he could this time be sure of
success. But the PSDB, a conglomerate of well-heeled notables in which
others had their own ambitions, was not of one mind behind him. The
party’s unsuccessful candidate for the presidency in 2002, José Serra,
now a senator for São Paulo, saw a different path to the eviction of
Dilma, one that could broaden support for her ouster and play into his
own hands. The drawback of Aécio’s route was that it also threatened
Temer as Dilma’s running mate. It therefore had small appeal for the
PMDB. Serra was close to Temer; they had long been associates in São
Paulo politics. Better then to launch impeachment proceedings against
Dilma in Congress, where Cunha could be expected to give them a
favourable hearing. Success would automatically make Temer president and
give Serra the ideal launching pad to succeed him, pipping Aécio for the
presidency.
Temer understandably warmed to this plan, and surreptitiously, the two
of them co-ordinated moves to bring it about. Behind them lay, yet more
discreetly, the PSDB’s elder statesman Fernando Henrique Cardoso, an
intimate friend and counsellor of Serra’s, who had never liked Aécio. It
only remained to work out the pretext for impeachment. Consensus was
reached on a technicality: Dilma had broken the law by deferring
payments on public accounts to make them look better for electoral
purposes. That this had been a long-standing practice, common to
previous governments, scarcely mattered. For by the summer of 2015 the
political landscape had been transformed by a scandal engulfing the
manoeuvres in Brasília.
*
The Lava Jato investigations came under the jurisdiction of the state
from which the first mid-level culprit to be caught, the doleiro (black
market money-changer) Alberto Youssef, hailed: the atypically
middle-class provincial society of Paraná, in the south of Brazil. Moro,
a native son who had cut his teeth as an assistant in the mensalão
trial, was the presiding judge in its capital Curitiba. His operational
model, as he made clear in an article published a decade before the Lava
Jato investigation began, would be the Mani Pulite prosecutions of
corruption, which had destroyed Italy’s governing parties in the early
1990s, bringing the First Republic to an end.[1] Moro singled out two
features of their campaign for praise: the use of preventive
imprisonment to secure delations and calibrated leaks to the press about
ongoing investigations to rouse public opinion and put pressure on
targets and courts. Dramatisation in the media mattered more than
presumption of innocence, which – Moro explained – was subject to
pragmatic considerations. In charge of Lava Jato, he proved an
exceptional impresario. Successive operations – raids, round-ups,
handcuffs, confessions – were given maximum publicity, with tip-offs to
press and television, each carefully assigned a number (to date there
have been 57, resulting in more than a thousand years of jail sentences)
and typically a name chosen for operatic effect from the cinematic,
classical or biblical imaginary: Bidone, Dolce Vita, Casablanca, No One
Sleeps, Erga Omnes, Aletheia, Last Judgment, Déjà Vu, Omertà, Abyss etc.
Italians pride themselves on a national flair for the spectacle: Moro’s
management left his Italian mentors looking flat-footed.
For a year, the Lava Jato operations focused on former directors of
Petrobras, charged with receiving and dispensing huge bribes. Then, in
April 2015, they brought down the first prominent cadre of the PT, João
Vaccari Neto, its treasurer. A few weeks later, the heads of the two
largest construction firms in the country, Odebrecht and Andrade
Gutierrez, each a continental conglomerate operating across Latin
America, were hauled away for questioning. By now demonstrations in
support of Moro – clamouring for punishment of the PT and removal of
Dilma –were building up, and putting Congress under siege. Cunha, still
formally part of the ruling coalition, edged towards clearing the docket
for impeachment. Isolated and weakened, Dilma accepted her PT ministers’
advice that Lula be called in to try to save the situation. He swiftly
set about mending fences with the PMDB. As he did so, it suddenly and
spectacularly came out that Cunha had millions of dollars in secret bank
accounts in Switzerland. Whereupon he offered a pact of mutual
protection: he would block proceedings against Dilma if the government
blocked proceedings against him. Lula urged acceptance of the deal, and
at summit level in Brasília an understanding was reached. But Dilma
refused, and the national leadership of the PT, based in São Paulo,
fearing that news of the arrangement could only confirm public
perceptions of the party as utterly corrupt, instructed its deputies to
vote for action against Cunha. In retaliation, he immediately cleared
the charges against Dilma for deliberation in Congress.
Moro, meanwhile, was preparing his coup de grâce. In the first week of
March 2016, Operation Aletheia seized Lula in the early hours of the
morning, taking him in for interrogation; press and television
photographers, tipped off in advance, blazed around him in the darkness.
He was now under formal Lava Jato investigation. Further sensation
followed. A phone call from Dilma to Lula to discuss the modalities of
appointing him as her chief of staff in Brasília was tapped by Moro and
instantly released to the press. Since politicians of ministerial rank,
as well as members of Congress, enjoy immunity from prosecution unless
authorised by the Supreme Court, there was uproar. This was simply a way
of shielding Lula from arrest. The appointment was struck down by two
judges in Brasília, the first a public vociferator against the PT on
Facebook, the second a PSDB placeman on the Supreme Court.
Street pressure for impeachment was by now enormous: across Brazil, 3.6
million demonstrators clamoured for Dilma’s eviction. Yet it was still
far from clear that the necessary two-thirds majority for impeachment
could be reached in Congress. In short order, a Lava Jato raid uncovered
the notebooks Odebrecht had kept, logging ciphered payments to what was
widely rumoured to be some two hundred Brazilian politicians, of
virtually all parties. At this, the sirens went off in the political
class. Within days a top power-broker in the PMDB was taped telling a
colleague that ‘this bleeding has got to be stopped.’ Since ‘the guys in
the Supreme Court’ had told him this was impossible as long as Dilma was
in place and the media in full cry after her, she had to be replaced by
Temer right away and a national government formed, backed by the Supreme
Court and the army – he had been talking with generals. Only in this way
could Lava Jato be halted before it reached the PMDB. Within a fortnight
the House voted, Cunha presiding, for Dilma’s impeachment. Moro could
then pick off Cunha, who had served his purpose. The Supreme Court
ordered Congress to dismiss him as speaker. In due course he was
expelled from the House, and ended up in prison. After a required
interval, the Senate found Dilma guilty on the indictment passed by the
House, and Temer took over the presidency. In early 2017, Lula was
arrested on a charge of corruption in the prospective acquisition of a
seafront apartment, of which he had never become owner. Tried in
Curitiba that summer, he was sentenced to nine years in jail; when he
appealed, they were increased to 12. With the party’s first president
behind bars, its second driven ignominiously from office, its popular
standing at an all-time low, the wreckage of the PT looked all but complete.
Reaction to Lula’s incarceration began to show that this was not
effectually so. Enemies in the PSDB had counted on him going into exile
rather than prison, flight to safety sealing his fall from grace. Taken
aback by his stoical acceptance of jail, they failed to reckon with the
sympathy his imprisonment might arouse. Within a few months, polls
showed he was once again the most popular leader in the country, and
ahead, even disqualified as a felon, in the contest for the presidency
in 2018. Lula’s personal appeal, however, was one thing, the future of
the PT another. The party had suffered a collapse without precedent in
Brazilian history. What kind of reckoning was required to redress it? In
its years of power, the PT had done little to foster a culture of
self-critical analysis; or reflection on where it, or the country, was
going. Intellectuals had been useful as a bridge to public visibility in
the early days. Once in office, though many – perhaps most – continued
to support it, the party essentially ignored them, in a myopic
philistinism for which all that mattered were electoral calculations.
*
Undeserved and unappreciated though he was, the party possessed one
political thinker of the first rank. The son of an Austrian Jewish
immigrant who became a leading left economist in Brazil, André Singer
was a founder member of the PT in São Paulo in 1980. He began as a
journalist, rising to a senior position in the less conservative of the
city’s two newspapers, the Folha, before becoming press secretary and
presidential spokesman for Lula during his first term in Brasília, at
the end of which he resigned to take up an academic career as a
political scientist. In 2012, when the PT still reigned unimpaired, he
produced the first serious study of the trajectory of its rule and of
its social support under Lula. Though written in respectful admiration
of what had been achieved, it was too calmly clear-eyed about the nature
and causes of the ‘weak reformism’ it represented to find favour with
the party, and had little echo within it. Last summer he published a
sequel, O lulismo em crise: Um quebra-cabeça do período Dilma, 2011-16
(‘Lulism in Crisis: A Puzzle of the Dilma Period’), which – even if
there is little sign of it yet – one may hope will meet less silence.[2]
From time to time, in different countries, books are compared to Marx’s
Eighteenth Brumaire, but as a dazzling synthesis of class analysis,
political narrative and historical imagination, none has ever really
approached it till this tour de force from Brazil. Singer’s tone, cool
and sober, passion contained rather than expressed, is quite different
from the blaze of Marx’s caustic irony and metaphoric intensity, and the
events at issue have been, so far at any rate, less blood-soaked and
precipitous. But the kind of intelligence at work, and its scope, are kin.
The puzzle Singer sets out to resolve is why, from the peak of its
success during his presidency, the formula of power Lula constructed
disintegrated into such all-round disaster. His opening argument is that
it was no familiar case of entropy in office. Dilma was not just a
maladroit imitation of her predecessor, bungling in pursuit of the same
policies. She had objectives of her own that differed from his. These
Singer characterises as a combination of ‘developmentalism’ and
‘republicanism’. The first, he argues, was a bid to accelerate growth by
way of a more ambitious use of the tools available to the national
state: control of interest rates, public lending, fiscal incentives,
import duties, social expenditures – in sum, a significantly more
interventionist set of economic policies than the PT had attempted
hitherto. By the second, he means republicanism in the classic sense, as
reconstructed by J.G.A. Pocock: that is, the 17th and 18th-century
belief that corruption was a perpetual danger to the integrity of the
state and the safety of citizens, against which vigilance was a
condition of liberty. Lula’s project had been a weak reformism: Dilma
aimed at a stronger version.
Its effect, however, was – Singer’s second argument – to knock away two
critical struts of Lula’s system, his entente with financial capital and
his pact with clientelism. With the aim of stimulating investment,
Dilma’s ‘new economic matrix’ sought to favour domestic industry – which
had long complained of Brazil’s sky-high interest rates, overvalued
currency, weak protection of local manufactures and costly energy inputs
– in the belief that its underlying interests divided it from banks,
securities firms and pension funds that benefited from these. But in
Brazil the different sectors of capital were too closely intertwined for
such a strategy of separation to work. It was denounced in the media as
a meddling, anti-liberal statism and business soon closed ranks against
it. More investment was not forthcoming, growth declined, profits
dropped, strikes multiplied. The employers’ federation turned extremely
hostile.
Meanwhile, by refusing to engage in the traditional do ut des of
Brazil’s pork barrel politics, and purging the government of its most
blatantly compromised ministers, Dilma was antagonising forces in
Congress on which her majority in the legislature depended, for whom
corruption was a condition of existence. After close-grained analysis of
the fractions of capital, Singer situates these tensions in a striking
overview of the longue durée of the party structure in Brazil, from the
postwar period to the present. Throughout, three components persisted.
From 1945 to 1964, when the military seized power, there was a party on
the liberal right of the spectrum, representing bankers, the urban
middle classes and a section of the rural oligarchy, the UDN; a popular
party on the left of the spectrum, the PTB, appealing to the
working-class and urban poor; and an intermediate party, the PSD, based
on the larger part of the traditional landowning class and its
dependants in the countryside and smaller provincial towns. Singer dubs
this last ‘the party of the interior’, an amoeba-like force with no
distinct ideological identity, slithering in whichever direction
temporary power and emoluments, democratic or undemocratic, lay. Twenty
years later, after the military stepped down, this trio essentially
reappeared in the shape of the PSDB, the PT and PMDB. Neither of the
first two could govern without the parasitic assistance of the third,
with its wide-flung capillary network of local office-holders and nearly
continuous control of the powerful presidency of the Senate. Any hint of
republicanism was anathema to it.
*
What of the PT’s own constituency? Although, ever since 1945, a pole of
capital and a pole of labour were clearly discernible within the
political system, conflict between them was always overdetermined by a
vast sub-proletariat, urban and rural, whose existence skewed the system
away from a class confrontation to a populist opposition between rich
and poor, in which the poor were available for demagogic or clientelist
capture by politicians of conservative as well as radical stamp. By 2006
Lula’s social policies, dramatically reducing poverty, had for the first
time made this mass, a great deal of it subsisting in the informal
economy, an electoral bastion of the PT, which Dilma inherited. Millions
had been lifted from acute hardship and knew to whom they owed it. But,
egged on by interested journalists and the ideology of the time, the
regime took to boasting of its achievement as the creation of a ‘new
middle class’ in Brazil, when the social promotion of most of those
affected was not only more modest – formal jobs and higher minimum wages
raising them to something like the position of a new working class – but
more precarious. Politically, Singer argues, the official propaganda
boomeranged: its effect was to invite identification with the
consumerist individualism of the actual middle class, rather than with
the existing working class.
Once growth went negative, downward mobility struck many of those just
risen. Frustration at this reversal of expectations was particularly
sharp among youth who had benefited from the popular expansion of higher
education, however indifferent in quality, that had been another of the
benefits extended by the PT to the poor, and who now found they had no
access to the jobs for which they had been led to hope. Here was the
combustible mass that became critical in the great street uprising of
June 2013 – some 1.5 million in the protests at their height – that
would be the watershed in the fortunes of Dilma and her party. Singer’s
meticulous analysis of its participants – statistics beyond the dreams
of Marx’s time – shows that 80 per cent of those who marched in the
demonstrations were below the age of forty. Eighty per cent had been or
were involved in some form of higher education, as against 13 per cent
of the population as a whole with a university diploma; yet half had
household incomes of no more than between two and five minimum wages,
where under two wages is the effective poverty line. Those below it, the
sub-proletariat proper, were marginal to the events, making up less than
a sixth of the participants. Decisive in the evolution and outcome of
the protests, however, was the ability of the other third of the
marchers, the true middle class, to secure the support of the half that
believed itself or aspired to be part of the middle class, in
generalised indignation at the government and, beyond it, the political
class as a whole – dynamic activists of a youthful new right mobilising
social media to bond them together as a force. Structurally, though not
sociologically, it might be said that in Singer’s vivid account the
uprising of 2013 occupies a position not unlike la pègre in Marx’s
account of 1848.
The victors who captured the movement, and made it into a springboard
for what would become much larger and more deadly assaults on the
government two years later, were the newest cohorts of the urban middle
class in the cities in the south of the country. Big business, the
working class and the poor had all benefited from PT rule.
Professionals, middle management, service personnel and small employers
had not. Their incomes had increased proportionately less than those of
the poor and their status had been eroded by new forms of popular
consumption and social mobility. Formally comprising the ‘modern’ sector
of Brazilian society, this layer was of sufficient size to have long
exercised a veto on changes that would make the rest of the country less
backward. But if it was large enough to frustrate the social inclusion
of the poor in national development, it was too small to have much hope
of dominating elections, once the suffrage was extended after the war.
The temptation, therefore, was always to short-circuit elections in a
coup. In 1964 much of the urban middle class had conspired with officers
to launch a military coup. In 2016 it mounted a parliamentary coup,
overthrowing the president within the framework of the constitution,
rather than suspending it.
This time it was not the military but the judiciary that acted as the
lever for an overturn which this stratum, organised simply in electoral
terms, as a party or set of parties, could not achieve. Magistrates,
closer in their career and culture to the civilian mass of the middle
class than officers, were more organic allies in a common cause.
Dissenting from both of the two opposite characterisations of the role
of the judges in Lava Jato – either fearless scourges of corruption,
impartially upholding the rule of law, or ruthless manipulators of it
for partisan political ends – Singer views their operations as at once
genuinely republican in effect, yet unmistakably factious in direction.
Republican: how else could the imprisonment of the richest and most
powerful tycoons in the land be described? Not without reason, another
of the operations of Lava Jato was named, after the indignant response
of a Petrobras boss on being put under arrest, Que pais é esse? – ‘What
kind of country is this?’ Factious: how else could the systematic
targeting of the PT, and sparing of other parties till Dilma was brought
down, be described? Not to speak of the blurting of political sympathies
and antipathies on Facebook, the smirking photo-ops of Moro with
ornaments of the PSDB and the rest. The contradiction was an
inextricable knot, entangled with that of the PT itself: the judges
‘factious and republican’, the party ‘created to change institutions and
swallowed by them’.
*
Having laid out the course on which Dilma embarked on taking office, the
economic and legislative obstacles into which it ran, the party system
in which it was encased, the array of class forces confronting it and
the judicial siege that eventually encircled it, Singer ends with a
graphic narrative of the sequence of moves and counter-moves by the
individual political actors in the hurly-burly towards impeachment. Here
personalities are given full weight. Dilma’s intentions were more than
honourable. She wanted to advance, not just preserve, the social gains
achieved by the PT under Lula and to free them from the connivances with
which they had been bought. But politically ill at ease, she compensated
with rigidity, and though in private she could be relaxed and charming
enough, in office she brooked neither criticism nor advice. For Singer,
she must be held responsible for two fatal and avoidable errors, in each
case refusing to heed her mentor. The first was her decision to stand
for president a second time in 2014, rather than stepping down to allow
Lula to return, as he had expected and wished to do. Out of culpable
vanity or natural pride in the autonomy of her project? At one point
Lula publicly allowed that he would be a candidate if there were a
danger of the PSDB making a come-back, as there soon was. But personal
bluntness was not his style: he never raised the matter directly with
her. The political convention in Brazil, as in the US, is that an
incumbent president runs for a second term, and he respected it.
The second charge against Dilma was her rejection of any deal with Cunha
to save herself from impeachment, which Lula believed necessary. For
Singer, there lies the critical difference of character. Politically, he
remarks, Lula would bend, but not break; Dilma would break rather than
bend. Blackmailers are never satisfied, she said: yield, and they will
always come back for more. Without putting it in so many words, Singer
sides with Lula. Politics as a vocation, Max Weber wrote, requires the
acceptance of ‘ethical paradoxes’. Citing him, Singer suggests that this
was an ‘obligation’ Dilma declined. It was such, because the
consequences of not bending were so grave. In stubbornly resisting a
deal, she opened the door to a ‘retrogression of the nation of
unpredictable proportions’.
In an otherwise magisterial reconstruction of Dilma’s downfall, these
concluding judgments seem questionable. Singer, it might be said, is
both a touch too uncritical, and too critical, of Dilma. What tells
against the attribution to her of a clear-cut republicanism, at any rate
at the start, are the two key advisers she chose when she first ran for
president, and installed next to her when she won. Head of her campaign,
and then chief of staff in Brasília (the equivalent of prime minister),
was the most notoriously corrupt single politician in the ranks of the
PT, Antonio Palocci, the toast of big business when he was Lula’s
finance minister, before being forced to resign after a particularly
ugly scandal in 2006. His reappearance in 2010 was greeted with delight
by the Economist, but it soon emerged that in the interim he had
acquired a massive unexplained fortune in consultancies and real estate
operations, and Dilma had to get rid of him. Predictably, this abject
figure would be the only PT leader to turn delator in Lava Jato. After
he was gone, João Santana remained by her side: her most intimate
counsellor, and by many accounts a critical influence on her decisions.
Once a musician in a backing group for Caetano Veloso, later a star
investigative reporter, before becoming the top-paid marqueteiro –
all-purpose commercial campaign manager and brand-fabricator – in the
country, Santana was put into marketing orbit by Palocci in his home
town and plied his services on an international scale; among his clients
was the billionaire presidential looter of Angola, Eduardo Santos. He
lasted six years with Dilma, before Lava Jato caught up with him for a
$10 million bribe he had salted away in the West Indies. Naturally, as a
mercenary, he too bought leniency with delation. In both cases, Dilma’s
judgment was less than republican. Not herself a product of the PT, of
which she had never been a member prior to joining Lula’s staff, she
could not so easily escape its habitus.
On the other hand, the criticisms that she damaged the party by not
passing the baton to Lula in 2014, and endangered the country by
refusing the pact with Cunha in 2016, imply two counterfactuals against
which the logic of the historical situation speaks. Had Lula rather than
Dilma run in 2014, he would certainly have won by a wider margin and
would have been unlikely to have made such a clumsily abrupt turn
towards austerity, alienating the poor. But the economic conjuncture did
not permit a repetition of the stimulus that allowed him to ride out the
global financial crisis of 2008 as a mere ‘ripple’ in Brazil. The
commodities super-cycle was over, all economic signals were pointing
down: the poison pills left by his own rule were being consumed.
Furthermore, the storm of Lava Jato would have hit his presidency with
yet greater force than it did Dilma’s. Personally, he was much more
exposed to its attack. There would have been no need to resort to
budgetary technicalities for an impeachment: it would have been much
more broadside, with even more deafening clamour on the streets and
screens of the country. His traditional political skills in handling
Congress might still have averted a fate that he had escaped once
before, at the time of the mensalão crisis, in the best of cases perhaps
allowing him to limp to the end of his term. But the price would have
been three years of being manacled with Cunha in such common
moral-political odium that, in all likelihood, retribution at the polls
in 2018 would have been even more devastating. There were good reasons
why not only Dilma, but the PT itself, rejected collusion with Cunha.
The price in credibility, which was already so damaged, was too high,
the pay-off too fleeting.
The judges themselves had scarcely more scruple in tolerating Cunha, so
long as he held the keys to impeachment, than the politician they had in
their sights. Singer’s account of the outlook and impact of the
magistrates of Lava Jato is a model of level-headed analysis. Still, it
leaves two questions open. Republican yet factious, yes: but what would
be the ultimate balance between the two – just of equal effect? Were
these, moreover, the only two elements in the make-up of the Brazilian
judiciary? Singer’s focus is on the pool in Curitiba. But it was
operating within a legal system that predated and overtopped it. There,
of decisive importance was the relationship between police, prosecutors
and judges. Formally speaking, each is a body independent of the other.
Police gather evidence, prosecutors bring charges, judges pronounce
verdicts (in Brazil juries exist only for cases of homicide). In
practice, however, Lava Jato fused these three functions into one,
prosecutors and police working under the supervision of the judge, who
controlled investigations, determined indictments and delivered
sentences. The negation of ordinary principles of justice in such a
system, even without Moro’s dismissal of presumption of innocence, is
plain: powers of accusation and condemnation are no longer distinguished.
To these were added three further powers. Delação premiada – informing
for a reward – introduced the practice, extended from judges to
prosecutors, of threatening people under arrest with crushing sentences
unless they implicated others: in effect, judicial blackmail. The scale
of abuse to which this power gives rise can be read off from the
treatment accorded the wealthiest magnate netted by Lava Jato. Marcelo
Odebrecht was sentenced to 19 years in prison on charges of corruption
to the tune of $35 million. Once he turned informer, these were reduced
to two and a half and he was sprung from jail without further ado. The
incentive to supply whatever claims might be useful for other cases the
magistrate is seeking to prosecute is obvious. Judges can even offer
pardons. A further facility afforded them was abolition of the rule that
appeal procedures had to be exhausted before an accused could be imprisoned.
Last but not least was the adoption, dating essentially from the
mensalão trial, of the concept of domínio de fato – condemnation in the
absence of any direct evidence of participation in a crime, on the
grounds that the accused must have been in charge of it. This was the
basis on which Lula’s chief of staff was sentenced, for his hierarchical
position as the head of political administration in Brasília. The notion
was borrowed from the principle of Tatherrschaft, developed by the
German jurist Claus Roxin for Nazi war crimes. Roxin, however, has
protested against Brazilian abuse of it: organisational position did not
suffice for the crime as he defined it – there had to be some proof of a
command. Moro, however, dispensed even with organisational hierarchy, in
deploying domínio de fato to convict Lula of intending to receive an
apartment from Odebrecht. The value of the property was $600,000, for
which he was jailed for 12 years: over two-thirds of Odebrecht’s
punishment, for less than 2 per cent of the sum for which he was
charged. The ratios speak for themselves.
*
In such cases, as processed in Curitiba, the combination of republican
zeal and factious bias identified by Singer applies. Moving up the
judicial ladder to Brasília, where the Supreme Court presides, the same
cannot be said. There, neither ethical rigour nor ideological fervour is
anywhere in sight: motivations are of an altogether different, more
squalid order. Unlike its counterparts anywhere else in the world, the
Brazilian Supreme Court combines three functions: it interprets the
constitution, acts as the last court of appeal in civil and criminal
cases and, crucially, is alone empowered to try public officials –
members of Congress and ministers – who otherwise enjoy immunity from
prosecution, popularly known as foro privilegiado, in all other courts
of the land. Its 11 members are appointed by the executive; their
confirmation by the legislature, quite unlike in the US, is no more than
pro forma. Previous experience on the bench is not required: only three
of the current justices have any. Mere practice as a lawyer or a
prosecutor, with a smattering of academic credentials, is the usual
background.
Selection to the Supreme Court has traditionally been based not so much
on ideological affinity as personal connection: of the current batch,
one is a former lawyer for Lula, another a crony of Cardoso, a third a
cousin of his disgraced predecessor Fernando Collor de Mello. The
caseload of the court is grotesque: more than five hundred before it
every year, allocated for preliminary consideration by lottery to
individual judges, each vested – no other supreme court in the world
features this – with arbitrary power to stall or to speed a case as they
please, delaying some for years, expediting others post-haste. In
practice, there are no deadlines. When a case is cleared for decision by
the plenum, hearings are not only public, but – another unique feature –
televised live, if the incumbent president of the court, who rotates,
sees fit. In such sessions, decorum is at a minimum, grandstanding at a
premium.
By the time pressure for impeachment began to build up, eight of the 11
members of the court had been picked by Lula or Dilma. But since
appointments had seldom been highly political in a partisan sense, only
one member of the court, Cardoso’s intimate Gilmar Mendes, had a
clear-cut ideological profile, as a hawk for the PSDB. The rest were not
of any particular colour, egoism and opportunism generally counting for
more than any other ism. But once the third function of the court, trial
of politicians, acquired a salience it had never known before, from the
mensalão scandal onwards, those who owed their appointment to Lula and
Dilma were on their mettle to show their independence of the PT. It was
the first black member of the court, Joaquim Barbosa, put there by Lula,
who handed down sentences of unprecedented harshness on PT cadres in the
mensalão trial. But as events were to show, this was not so much
independence in the sense of an impartial justice, as replacement of a
rather nominal dependence on patrons by a more telling submission to the
media.
From the start, the pool in Curitiba used leaks and planted stories in
the press to short-circuit due process, convicting targets before trial
in public opinion, in accord with the Brazilian wisdom – valid across
the world – that ‘public opinion is what gets published.’ Such leaks are
juridically forbidden. Moro employed them scot-free, systematically. He
could do so, because the media which he used as his megaphone
intimidated the Supreme Court judges, who feared denunciation if they
demurred. When Moro was instructed by one justice that on habeas corpus
grounds he must release a Petrobras director he was holding in prison,
he went to the media, explaining that if so he must release drug
traffickers too. His superior immediately backed down. When he broke no
less than three regulations in tapping and publishing the phone call
between Lula and Dilma, and received a feeble reprimand from the same
judge, Moro retorted that he had acted in the public interest, and –
since he was now fêted in the press as a national hero – suffered not
even a slap on the wrist.
Craven in covering illegalities below, the Supreme Court was no better –
servility and self-interest competing – in performance of its tasks
above. If the attorney general brings charges against a member of
Congress or the government, the court determines whether to hold a
trial, its decision requiring ratification by Congress. Charges were
brought against Cunha as soon as his Swiss bank accounts were revealed.
The court did not stir for six months, until he set off Dilma’s
impeachment. Then it not only accepted the indictment overnight, but –
eager to obfuscate its inaction – peremptorily ordered his dismissal as
Speaker, which it had no constitutional authority to do. As Cunha
remarked with cynical accuracy, ‘If it was urgent, why did it take them
six months?’ When Delcídio do Amaral, a PT – former PSDB – senator, was
caught on tape discussing ways of spiriting a Petrobras boss out of
prison, the court acted with lightning speed, arresting him within 24
hours. He had let slip he was on good terms with the judges and was
sounding them out about the case. Once he offered due delation, charges
were quietly dropped, and he was restored to the Senate. In its lack of
any principled compass, the critic Conrado Hübner Mendes has observed, a
court which was supposed to be a power moderating tensions in the
constitution, had become – a stronger word is in order than his – an
abscess generating them.[3]
*
Holding out for less than 18 months before she was evicted from the
Presidential Palace, Dilma’s second mandate was barren of achievement.
Temer’s annexation of it, lasting twice as long, was altogether more
consequential. Acting with a speed and resolve that made clear the depth
of the planning behind the impeachment, the new regime passed three
classical pieces of neoliberal statecraft in short order, altering the
economic constitution of the country at a stroke. Within a month,
legislation freezing social expenditures for twenty years – no increase
beyond the rate of inflation – was in front of Congress. No sooner was
it passed with a two-thirds majority than the labour code was
comprehensively scrapped: the legal limit of a working day was extended
from eight to 12 hours; permissible lunch breaks cut from an hour to
thirty minutes; protection of employees, full or part-time, reduced; the
check-off of union dues abolished; plus sundry other deregulations of
the labour market. A third law gave a generalised green light to the
outsourcing of employment and zero-hour contracts. Next up was radical
pension reform, increasing contributions and raising retirement ages, to
bring down the costs of constitutionally mandated social security in the
name of reducing the national debt. Since beneficiaries of the most
lavish payments under the existing system come from the top ranks of the
bureaucracy and the political class, this was a somewhat trickier
proposition.
But before it could come to a vote, Temer looked within an ace of
following Dilma out of office. In the spring of 2017 he was taped in a
secret meeting with Joesley Batista, head of the meat-processing company
JBS, in the garage of the Presidential Palace discussing hush money for
Cunha – who had just been sentenced and could implicate him in any
number of corrupt schemes – unaware that his interlocutor was
collaborating with the police. The tape was immediately broadcast on
national television, to an uproar without precedent. A fortnight later,
one of Temer’s aides was filmed receiving a suitcase containing 500,000
reais from an emissary of Batista. For the Supreme Court to act on the
charges immediately laid against him by the attorney general, the House
had to authorise proceedings by a two-thirds vote. Beyond shame, a
majority rejected any investigation.
Two months later, the attorney general issued a much wider indictment of
Temer, along with six other PMDB leaders, three of them already under
lock and key – one caught with the largest cash hoard in history, $55
million in banknotes, in his home. Once again, the House blocked any
action. A year later, in October 2018, a third major scandal exploded,
with federal police bringing charges of long-standing corruption in the
docks at Santos against Temer. By then, paralysed politically for more
than a year, though he had survived every revelation, he had no agenda
left. The conventional stabilisation plan accompanying his initial
neoliberal measures had ended the Dilma recession, but the pick-up was
weak – growth asthmatic, living standards depressed, 13 million
unemployed. Temer’s own credibility sub-zero, his party ran the finance
minister who had presided over this recovery, Henrique Meirelles, for
president in 2018. He got 1 per cent of the vote. Yet this muted interim
had, all the same, cleared the way for a high-pitched obbligato to come.
II: Bolsonaro
By mid-2016, economic deterioration and political corruption had sunk PT
rule. But by the end of 2017, its successor, the PMDB, had fallen even
lower in the polls, for the same two reasons. Since the PSDB was part of
Temer’s support system, with prominent members of the party in the
government, it too could not escape the stench – Aécio, its chairman,
had also been taped demanding a large bribe from JBS, and like Temer,
had only avoided a trial thanks to the protection of a Congress packed
with confederates. In this devastated landscape, Lula – still on appeal
– remained far the most popular politician in the country, and if
nothing were done about it, the most likely victor in the oncoming
presidential election. With unprecedented speed – the average time for
judging an appeal was cut by three-quarters to eliminate the danger –
the verdict not merely confirming but increasing his sentence was handed
down in January 2018. For two months Lula’s lawyers were able to delay
his imprisonment, and in the respite he gave a set of three extended
interviews published immediately as a book, A verdade vencerá.[4] The
title (‘The Truth Will Prevail’) is misleading, suggesting a rebuttal of
the charges against him that are scarcely mentioned in a memorable,
often moving self-portrait of a politician of exceptional intuition and
realist intelligence – which explains why his return to power was so
resisted by the Brazilian elites.
Jair Bolsonaro
Jair Bolsonaro
As a ruler, Lula’s operating style and political creed were one. He was
a trade unionist who back in the early 1980s learned, as he puts it, not
‘to make demands of the type “80 per cent or nothing”. That way you end
up with nothing.’ On becoming president of a huge, complex society in
2003, he was always aware that ‘I could never treat the country wishing
it were as I am.’ It followed that ‘to govern is to negotiate.’ In
opposition, you could be principled. But once you win elections, if you
don’t have a majority in parliament, which no Brazilian president has
enjoyed for many years, ‘you have to put your principles on the table to
make them practicable.’ That meant dealing with adversaries as well as
allies, who wanted quid pro quo – political offices, above all. Every
predecessor had had to do the same. ‘You make an agreement with who is
there, in Congress. If they are robbers, but have votes, you either have
the courage to ask for them, or you lose.’ By this reasoning, Dilma
should have made a deal with Cunha. There was no feasible alternative.
But negotiation was one thing, conciliation another. ‘A government of
conciliation is one where you can do more and don’t want to do it. When
you can only do less and end up doing more, it’s almost the beginning of
a revolution – and that’s what we did in this country.’ Lula had made
only such concessions as the situation required. The PT had less than
one-fifth of Congress. Had he ever controlled the governorships of 23
states and the majority in the Constituent Assembly, as the PMDB had in
1988, he would have conceded less and accomplished much more. Even so,
‘we gave the people a standard of living that many armed revolutions
never achieved – and in a mere eight years.’ He had ended with opinion
polls in the skies. But that in itself was not a source of pride. ‘What
I am proudest of is to have changed the relation of the state with
society, and of government with society. What I wanted to achieve as
president was that the poorest in the country could imagine themselves
in my place. That I did.’
It is an impressive claim. Lula’s largeness of mind and feeling, as well
as his quickness, come across vividly throughout the exchanges.
Self-critical they are not. Did he pick the wrong successor? He chose
Dilma because she was a tough, efficient chief of staff who gave him
some peace and quiet in the Presidential Palace. He knew she was
politically inexperienced, but – knowing she was better educated than he
was – believed she would learn; only later did he realise that she
didn’t actually enjoy politics. But he wasn’t wrong to have selected
her. Unacknowledged in the interviews is the probable assumption that
precisely because she was a novice, Lula could control her better than
any practised cadre of the PT. Nor, more significantly, is there any
sense that the arts of acquiring mercenary support in Congress imposed
not only limits on what he could do (which he admits) but costs to his
party, as it in turn became infected by them (which he doesn’t).
Projected onto the plane of national politics, the model of economic
negotiation he brought from his trade union background lost its
innocence and bred illusion. Wage agreements don’t involve backhanders
to employers. Still less, where power is at stake, can adversaries be
counted on not to go va banque.
In a final poignant exchange, when Lula declared that if he returned to
power, he would do more – go further – than he had done earlier, and his
opponents knew it, he was asked whether he thought a return was even
possible. He was within a month of beginning his sentence. This was his
wistful reply:
Oh, I want to come back. That depends on whether God gives me health,
keeps me alive; and it depends on the understanding of members of the
judicial power who are going to vote, whether they take care to read the
records of the case and see the dirty tricks being played there.
To the last, Lula believed a deal could be reached that would allow him
to run again: that was how negotiations ended. He had fatally
underestimated his enemies. They were determined to eliminate him. In
April 2018, an ultimate plea for habeas corpus, which would have enabled
him to run for the presidency, went to the Supreme Court. The Brazilian
constitution states that no criminal conviction can be executed until it
is definitive – that is, until all instances of appeal have been
exhausted. The head of the army warned that granting him habeas corpus
would threaten the stability of the country, which it was the
institutional duty of the armed forces to defend. The judges did their
duty with alacrity, overturning the constitutional principle by a vote
of six to five to bar Lula’s candidacy.
In the arena thus cleared, the presumptive front-runner for the
presidency became the PSDB candidate, Geraldo Alckmin, long-time
governor of São Paulo. A wooden figure with no charisma, he had lost
against Lula in 2006, but was less compromised by support for Temer than
his rivals in the party and enjoyed solid backing from business. The PT
was paralysed, incapable of entering the ring since it still insisted,
despite the evident impossibility, that Lula remained its candidate. At
the starting gate an outsider led the way with a modest 15 per cent
support: Jair Bolsonaro, a lone wolf deputy so isolated he had received
just four votes out of 513 when he ran for speaker after Cunha fell.
Marginality in Congress was not, however, necessarily a disadvantage in
running for president. Having never belonged to any of the major parties
– roaming between seven smaller ones – nor held any government office,
Bolsonaro was untainted by blame for economic hardship or exposure of
corruption, and free to attribute the former to the latter, assailing
the whole political class for both. But his praise for the 1964-85
dictatorship and its torturers, and vituperations at large, appeared
such conspicuous handicaps that it was generally assumed that once
campaigning got underway, he would be relegated to the also-rans.
Alckmin, by contrast, had not only the PSDB behind him, but promptly the
entire so-called centrão, the swamp of intermediate-sized parties of
which Lula complained, giving him half of all the TV time assigned to
party commercials – in the past a priceless asset. With this, he was
widely expected to overwhelm Bolsonaro and other potential rivals. Seven
television debates, featuring all the candidates, were scheduled once
campaigning began. Starting in August, they exposed Bolsonaro’s
disadvantage in the medium: poorly prepared and ill at ease, he was
ineffectual. The more he was exposed to it, the flakier he was likely to
look. In the first week of September, however, this danger was suddenly
lifted. Stabbed by a mentally ill man at a provincial rally and rushed
to hospital for an emergency operation, he spent the rest of the
election safely in bedridden recovery, protected not only from debates
or interviews, but from the demolition that Alckmin’s managers had been
readying on their TV slots – sympathy for a victim who had nearly lost
his life now precluded anything so tasteless.
The PT, meanwhile, had been wasting months in futile protestations that
Lula was still its candidate, without even a symbolic presence in the
first debates. It was not until five days after Bolsonaro’s stabbing
that the party came to terms with reality and produced a candidate able
to run. Its choice was dictated by Lula. Fernando Haddad had for six
years been education minister and was widely regarded as a success,
responsible for one of the major achievements of PT rule, expansion of
the university system, and of access to it for the poor. Young and
personable, he could have made a much better, more logical successor in
2010 than Dilma. But he had three strikes against him: he was from São
Paulo, where older and more powerful heavyweights of the PT, protective
of their precedence, held sway; he came from the left of the party; and
by background he was an academic – trained in philosophy and economics,
teaching political science – among trade unionists who distrusted
professors.
In 2012 Haddad was instead elected mayor of São Paulo. He soon fell foul
of Dilma, who refused to listen to his plea to raise petrol prices
rather than inflict higher bus fares on the city, setting off the
protests of 2013 that began her undoing and ended his prospects of
re-election. He continued to lack any significant base of his own within
the PT, whose functionaries distrusted him. As early as 2003, in a
prophetic article written as the PT took power, he had warned of the
danger that, rather than uprooting the deeply engrained patrimonialism
of the Brazilian state, the party could be captured by it. Brazil was
not, contrary to the views of Cardoso and others, a setting in which
modern capitalism made use of the archaisms of a former slave society
but the other way round: an archaic oligarchic system appropriating a
modern capitalism to preserve the traditional pattern of power by
saturating public authority with its private interests. By 2018, amid
the patrimonial shipwreck that had overtaken the PT, Haddad’s foresight
and honesty stood out and, knowing he was clean and imaginative, Lula
imposed him on the party.
The ensuing campaign was strangely asymmetric. Starting late, Haddad was
cramped by the circumstances of his appointment. With less than a month
to go before the first round of the election, he had to establish a
national profile of his own, against charges that he was a mere dummy
for Lula, while at the same time drawing as effectively as possible on
Lula’s continuing popularity and prestige. It rapidly became clear that
he and Bolsonaro would face off in the second round, but there was no
confrontation between the two. Haddad toured the country, addressing
crowds, while Bolsonaro lay at home tweeting. With a fortnight to go
till the first round, they were level-pegging in predictions for the
second. Then, in the last few days, Bolsonaro suddenly soared ahead, to
a closing lead of 46 to 29 per cent. With a gap as large as this, the
second round was a foregone conclusion. The Brazilian establishment
closed ranks behind the future victor. Haddad fought valiantly on,
eventually halving the gap. But the final result left no doubt of the
scale of Bolsonaro’s triumph. Winning 55 to 45 per cent, he took every
state outside the north-eastern redoubt of the PT; every major city in
the country; every social class with the exception of the very worst
off, living on incomes of less than two minimum wages; every age group;
and both sexes – only among the cohort between 18 and 24 did he fail to
win a majority of women’s votes. Across the country, the right jubilated
in the streets. But there had been no great rush to the polls. Voting is
compulsory in Brazil, but close to a third of the electorate – 42
million voters – opted out, the highest proportion in twenty years. The
number of spoiled ballots was 60 per cent higher than in 2014. A few
days earlier, an opinion poll asked voters their state of mind: 72 per
cent replied ‘despondent’, 74 per cent ‘sad’, 81 per cent ‘insecure’.
In that last response lay, in all probability, the key to Bolsonaro’s
sweep. The recession had certainly been critical in the melting away of
support for the PT since 2014, and corruption, which had not mattered to
the poor when their living standards were rising, did when they were
falling. The two could be directly connected in nightly representations
on television of huge sewers swilling with banknotes – in the discourse
of Lava Jato, money stolen from hospitals, schools and playgrounds. But
underlying popular reactions was insecurity, physical and existential.
Notoriously, daily violence – traditional in the feudatory north-east,
modern since the arrival of the drug trade in the south-east – takes
sixty thousand lives a year, a homicide rate exceeding that of Mexico.
Police account for 20 to 25 per cent of these deaths. Fewer than 10 per
cent of murders are investigated. Yet prisons are teeming: 720,000
people in jail. Two-fifths of inmates, under provisional arrest, await
trials that can take two, three or more years to be heard. Nearly half
the country’s population is white; 70 per cent of those murdered, and 70
per cent of those imprisoned, are not. With drugs have come gangs, among
the most powerful in the world. In 2006 the largest of these, Primeiro
Comando da Capital (PCC), shut down parts of São Paulo in an uprising,
directed from the prison cells of its leaders, against the police. But
with the spread of drugs, street crime that is artisanal rather than
organisational has proliferated too. Few middle-class households have
never had a brush with some form of it. But they are better protected:
where mugging at gun or knifepoint are most common, the poor rob the poor.
*
In this jungle, the police are the most ruthless of all predators: no
major crime without their take. Divided into separate ‘military’ and
‘civilian’ branches, in a ratio of about three to one, they are state,
not federal forces. Alongside them fester informal ‘militias’ composed
of former policemen acting as security guards or battening on the drug
traffic. The small corps of federal police – a tenth the size of the
military police at the disposal of the governors of São Paulo and Rio de
Janeiro – is reserved largely for border control and white-collar crime.
Promotion depends on arrest rates, which are assisted by laws that no
longer distinguish between the sale and the consumption of drugs, nor
require witnesses for apprehension on the spot, offering a quick route
to the criminalisation of poverty, as the young and black – pardo
(‘mixed race’) and preto (‘black’) scarcely distinguished – are picked
off for dispatch to jails where there are twice as many prisoners as
places. Since miscegenation was historically so widespread, making a
‘one-drop’ colour line impossible, racism in Brazil differs from the US
pattern, but is no less brutal. Combined with very rapid urbanisation,
driven as much by the push of peasants from the land as by the pull of
city lights, creating settings of huge inequality with few or no
structures of reception, its effect is to displace social conflict into
anomic violence. For black youth, crime can be a desperate bid for
recognition, a weapon, a passport to dignity: guns, rented for a few
hours and pointed at the head of a driver or passer-by becoming too a
means of forcing people to look at, rather than away from, those
otherwise treated as invisible. Successive presidents, relieved of
responsibility for public security, since this remains the province of
governors, have had little incentive to change what amounts to a
convenient brief for inaction. At most, they can declare an emergency
and send in troops to occupy slums, as a temporary exercise in public
relations, leaving scant trace.
For the popular classes, intersecting with and compounding an ambience
of everyday violence has been the disintegration of norms of customary,
family and sexual life, fanned not just by the diffusion of drugs, but
by the media – television, keeping up with North American models,
throwing earlier restraints to the winds. Women are the principal
victims. Rape is as common as murder in Brazil: more than sixty thousand
a year, around 175 a day – the number reported has doubled in the last
five years. Amid all this, economic anxieties are the most permanent and
intense – insecurity at its most fundamental level, of food and shelter.
In such conditions, a desperate desire for order has increasingly been
met by Pentecostal religion, its churches offering an ontological
framework for making sense of lives on the edge of existence. Their
trademark is a theology not of liberation but of ‘prosperity’ as the
means of earthly salvation. By hard work, self-discipline, correct
behaviour and communal support, believers can better themselves – and
pay tithes to the pastoral organisation helping them. Typically, the
neo-Protestant churches are also shady financial corporations, which
make millionaires of their chief ministers. By 2014 the evangelical
flocks in Brazil numbered some eighty million. The Pentecostal
enterprises were a power in the land; a fifth of the deputies in
Congress thought it to their advantage to declare an affiliation with
them. Four years later, however, the conditions of their following had
altered. The success of the theology of prosperity had coincided with
the boom years of Lula’s presidency, giving credibility to its optimism
of material uplift. By 2018, the promise of steady improvement was gone.
For many, everything now seemed to be falling apart.
Nowhere were these stresses more acute than in Brazil’s second city.
Rio, with half the population of São Paulo, has a murder rate more than
twice as high. In large part this is due to the unrivalled degree of
control across São Paulo – a city built on a plateau – exercised by the
dominant paulista gang, the PCC. There it is in a position to discourage
petty assaults – which complicate the orderly management of high-value
drug traffic – with the heavy weapons at its disposal. Rio’s topography
– a narrow, winding strip of coastland segmented by forest-clad
mountains jutting through to beaches, favelas crammed in their
interstices, often cheek by jowl with wealthy neighbourhoods – hinders
such centralised power. There rival gangs wage fierce territorial
warfare heedless of bystander casualties, and amid greater levels of
poverty a denser arms trade multiplies the random mayhem of individual
hold-ups. In early 2018, to stopper the violence, Temer sent in the army
– and there it has remained, as in the past, to no lasting effect. In
this environment, the PT was never able to take root, still less the
PSDB, or any stable partisan configuration. All three of the last
governors of the state are in jail or custody for corruption. What did
take political hold, with a grip more extensive than in any other big
city, were the evangelical churches. Cunha, for long Rio’s dominant
politician, was a lay preacher linked to the Assembly of God, the
largest Pentecostal denomination. Its current mayor is a bishop of the
rival Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and nephew of its capo,
Edir Macedo, Brazil’s (much more powerful) answer to the Reverend Moon.
Bolsonaro is a product of this petri dish. He was born in 1955 in the
small-town interior of São Paulo state, but his career has unfolded
entirely in Rio, where at the age of 18, in the time of the
dictatorship, he entered a military academy close to the city, training
as a parachutist. Rising within ten years to the rank of captain, in
1986 he published an article complaining of low salaries in the army and
was arrested for indiscipline. On release he plotted a series of minor
explosions at various barracks to press home material discontent in the
ranks. Probably because he enjoyed some protection from higher officers
in sympathy with his aims, if not his methods, an investigation found
the evidence against him – which included maps drawn in his hand –
inconclusive. But he was forced to retire aged just 33. Five months
later he got himself elected to the city council in Rio. Within another
two years, he had vaulted to Congress on the votes of the Vila Militar,
an area in the west of the city built for soldiers and their families
containing the largest concentration of troops in Latin America, and of
the zone around the military academy to the south of the city where he
had been a cadet.
In Brasília, Bolsonaro was soon calling for a regime of exception and
the temporary closure of Congress, and the following year – this was
1994 – declared he would rather ‘survive in a military regime than die
in this democracy’. Over the next two decades, his parliamentary career
consisted largely of speeches extolling the military dictatorship and
the armed forces; calling for the death penalty, a lower age of criminal
responsibility, easier access to guns; and attacking leftists,
homosexuals and other enemies of society. He was returned six times, his
electoral base in the barracks and their precincts holding steady at
much the same level – around 100,000 votes – until 2014, when it
suddenly quadrupled. The jump, little noticed at the time, was more than
a general effect of the economic crisis, though clearly lifted by it.
Dislike of the PT – antipetismo – had long been a powerful strain in
Brazilian political culture as a middle-class counterpoint to PT
ascendancy, intensified as the media (above all Veja, the country’s
leading news magazine) whipped up outrage at corruption to boost the
PSDB’s campaigns to capture the presidency. But no one could compete
with Bolsonaro for virulence on this front. He had, moreover, learned
something from the urban uprising of 2013 that the PSDB had not. Then,
young activists of a new right in São Paulo – far ahead of their elders
or the political class generally – had pioneered the use of social media
to mobilise what became vast anti-government demonstrations. They were
radical neoliberals, which Bolsonaro was not, and there was little
contact between the two. But he could see what they had achieved and set
up his own personal operation in Rio in advance of any competitor. By
late 2017 he was far ahead of the pack, with seven million followers on
Facebook, double the number of the country’s leading newspaper.
The success of the image he projected in this medium was a reflection
not just of the violence of his pronouncements. The impression of
Bolsonaro given by press coverage abroad, of an unremitting feral
fanaticism, is misleading. The public personality is more ambiguous than
that: crude and violent certainly, but with a boyish, playful side,
capable of a popular, on occasion even self-deprecating, good humour,
far from the glowering bearing of Trump, with whom he is now often
compared. His background was less grindingly poor than Lula’s – his
father an unlicensed dentist plying his trade from one small town to
another – but plebeian enough by the standards of the Brazilian elite.
Though he is now well-off (the owner of five properties), a common touch
comes naturally. His charisma travels especially among the young, both
popular and more educated.
Married three times, Bolsonaro has four sons by his first two wives and
one daughter (‘a moment of weakness’, he likes to joke) by his third,
Michelle, a volunteer for a spin-off branch of the Assembly of God,
whose televangelist leader, the third richest pastor in Brazil (worth
reputedly $150 million), married the couple. After he was investigated
by the federal police, she left for a ‘Baptist Attitude’ church near
their apartment. Though a Catholic by origin, Bolsonaro has made sure of
the best evangelical credentials, travelling with a pastor to be
baptised in Israel. The family is his political fortress. Unlike the
Trump household, the three eldest Bolsonaro sons have all made
successful electoral careers: one is now a deputy for the Rio Assembly;
another, in São Paulo, the most voted-for deputy in Brazilian history;
the third a councillor in Rio. They are often seen as a mixture of
brains trust and bodyguard around him, while Michelle is the gatekeeper
to the outside world.
Though long a somewhat friendless loner in Congress, Bolsonaro
understood the need for allies to reach the presidency, and showed he
had the skills to acquire them. For his running mate, he chose a
five-star general, Hamilton Mourão, who had just retired after becoming
too outspoken: he had openly attacked Dilma’s government; declared that
if the judiciary failed to restore order in Brazil, the military should
intervene to do so; and floated the idea of an ‘auto-coup’ by an acting
president, should that be necessary. (In other asides he remarked that
the country needed to improve its stock, since Indians were lazy, blacks
deceitful and Portuguese spoiled.) Given that Bolsonaro’s primary
political base had always been military, the choice of Mourão was
logical and well received in the army. But he also needed to reassure
business, wary of him not just as a wild card, but as a congressman with
a consistently ‘statist’ voting record, an opponent of privatisations
and grudging of foreign investment. So, with a smile of engaging
candour, he confessed himself ignorant of economics, though capable of
learning from those who knew better, and found his mentor in an
economist down the road.
Paulo Guedes had been trained in Chicago, taught in Chile under
Pinochet, and returned to Rio a successful financier. He was not highly
regarded by his fellow economists, and never got much of an academic job
in Brazil, but he had co-founded the country’s largest private
investment bank, BTG Pactual, and made a fortune from it, departing for
other ventures well before it was caught up in Lava Jato investigations.
A neoliberal pur sang, his chief remedies for Brazil’s economic ills are
the privatisation of all state enterprises and assets to pay off the
national debt, and deregulation of every transaction in sight. With
promises like these – even if some were sceptical they could so easily
be kept – capital had little to complain of. Financial markets were
squared; security and economy taken care of: that left corruption. On
course for victory after the first round of the election, Bolsonaro
dispatched Guedes to get Moro on board. He needed little persuasion:
within a few days of the second round, Bolsonaro announced that Moro had
accepted his invitation to become justice minister in the incoming
government. The magistrates of Mani Pulite, intending to clean up the
Italian political system, put paid to the ruling parties of the First
Republic and were appalled to find they had ushered in Berlusconi. In
Brazil the star judge of Lava Jato, after achieving much the same, was
happy to join an analogue fouler by any measure.
*
Installed in January, the new regime marks a more radical break with the
era of the PT than the managers of Dilma’s ouster, their own parties
severely depleted at the polls, ever imagined. Central to its
composition is the return of the armed forces to the front of the
political stage, thirty years after the end of the military
dictatorship. No institutional adjustment was required. In the 1980s,
Brazilian democracy was not wrested by popular revolt from the generals,
but passed back to parliament by the generals once they considered their
mission – eradication of any threat to the social order – accomplished.
There was no settlement of accounts with the conspirators and torturers
of 1964-85. Not only were they ensured immunity from prosecution or
absolved by law from anything they had done, but their overthrow of the
Second Republic was given constitutional sanction with the legalisation
of their rulers as regular presidents of Brazil and the acceptance of
legislation introduced by them as normal juridical continuity with the
past. In all cases, the South American tyrannies of the 1960s and 1970s
made an amnesty for their crimes a condition of withdrawing to the
barracks. In every other country the crimes were partially or completely
annulled once democracy was consolidated. Uniquely, not in Brazil. In
every other country, within one to five years a Truth Commission was set
up to examine the past. In Brazil it took 23 years for one to be
approved by the Chamber of Deputies and no action was taken against the
perpetrators it named. Indeed, in 2010 the Supreme Court declared the
amnesty law nothing less than a ‘foundation of Brazilian democracy’.
Eight years later, in a speech commemorating the thirtieth anniversary
of the constitution enacted after the generals had left, the president
of the Supreme Court, Dias Toffoli – former legal errand boy of the PT
and arguably the most despicable single figure in today’s political
landscape – formally blessed their seizure of power, telling his
audience: ‘Today I no longer refer to a coup or a revolution. I refer to
the movement of 1964.’
The army had its electoral say early on in 2018. In April, the
commander-in-chief, Eduardo Villas Bôas, warned against any grant of
habeas corpus to Lula, in the name, as he later explained, of the
highest value cherished by the armed forces, the stability of the
country. With Bolsonaro safely elected, Villas Bôas hailed the new
president’s victory as a welcome release of national energy, and in
January thanked him for ‘liberation from the ideological shackles
sequestering free thought’ in Brazil. To discuss 1964 today was
ridiculous, he said, and the Truth Commission a disservice to the
country. Questions of public security were also matters of national
security. Villas Bôas had taken part in one of the periodic military
interventions to restore order in the slums of Rio, and seen how futile
civilian incompetence had made them. In that they resembled Brazilian
military intervention in Haiti in 2004, which had been much too short,
according to Villas Bôas, chaos returning as soon as its troops
departed. Not a lesson lost on Bolsonaro, whose key first appointment
was General Augusto Heleno, the commander of the Brazilian forces
dispatched to Haiti – to his shame, under Lula, to please Washington –
to lock down the eviction of Aristide. Heleno was installed as head of
‘institutional security’– a kind of super chief of staff – in the
Presidential Palace, where another general, Santos Cruz, also a veteran
of Haiti, is in charge of relations with Congress, flanked by two more
officers in the ministries of defence, and science and technology.
Heleno, the most powerful of the group, has made no secret of his
convictions, expressed in the dictum ‘direitos humanos são para humanos
direitos’ (‘human rights are for the righteous’) – not for anyone else.
His first pronouncement in government was to compare guns with cars as
something every citizen has the right to possess.
The economic wing of the government, of far greater concern to financial
markets, is more friable. Guedes has assembled around him a team mostly
of like-minded radical neoliberals, greeted with enthusiasm by business,
and able to build on the deregulation Temer had already delivered. Top
of the agenda is the dismantling of the existing pension system.
Indefensible on any measure of social justice, absorbing a third of tax
revenues, over a half of its total payouts – which start at an average
age of 55 for men – are taken by the wealthiest fifth of the population
(judges, officers and bureaucrats prominent in their ranks), less than 3
per cent by those who are worst-off. Naturally, however, inequity isn’t
the driver of standard schemes of pension reform, whose priority in
Brazil, as elsewhere, is not to redress it but to slash the cost of
pensions in the budget, while other cuts in public spending wait in the
pipeline. Privatisations are advertised as the way to pay off the debt.
A hundred state holdings of one kind or another – the plums are in
infrastructure: motorways, ports, airfields – are scheduled for disposal
or closure, naturally also in the name of efficiency and better service,
under the direction of a military engineer, another veteran of Haiti. As
under Cardoso, many of the richest pickings will no doubt go to foreign
investors. The elated reaction of the Financial Times to the economic
package in prospect is understandable. Why worry about a few political
gaffes? ‘López Obrador Is Bigger Threat to Liberal Democracy than
Bolsonaro,’ its Latin American editor decided.
The cutting-edge austeritarian overhaul of the economy in view requires,
of course, passage through Congress. There, much Brazilian commentary
expects resistance, given the dependence of so many members of Congress
on the provision of federal funding to their localities, which austerity
would undercut. Privatisation, too, is often thought to be so at
variance with the statist nationalism of the Brazilian military – as a
deputy, Bolsonaro himself vehemently opposed it – that it is likely to
be watered down in practice. On both counts, some scepticism is
warranted. Under the PT presidencies, the legislature was a fundamental
barrier to the will of the executive, limiting what it could do and
compromising it in what it did, with notorious results. But this was the
predictable product of tensions between a radical party in control of
one branch of the constitution and a salmagundi of conservative parties
in control of another. Where no comparable tension existed between
president and Congress, as under the centre-right administration of
Cardoso, the executive was rarely frustrated – privatisations, for
example, sailing through. Bolsonaro’s brand of neoliberalism promises to
be significantly more drastic but his popular mandate for change is much
greater and opposition to it in Congress notably weaker.
There his fly-by-night Social Liberal Party (PSL), cobbled together
within a few weeks of the elections, will be the largest force in the
lower chamber, once it is topped up, as it will be, with desertions from
the huge marsh of venal lesser groupings. The once mighty PSDB and PMDB
have been reduced to shadows of their former selves, their
representation in Congress halved. The debacle of the PSDB and its
patriarch has been especially striking. After failing to persuade one
vacuous TV presenter to run for the presidency, seeing his party’s
candidate get less than 5 per cent of the national vote, and refusing to
support Haddad against Bolsonaro in the second round, Cardoso ended up
with the PSDB in São Paulo – and no doubt soon nationally – in the hands
of João Doria, another TV presenter-cum-entrepreneur, host of a show
modelled on Trump’s Apprentice. This reptilian figure ran on a ticket
brazenly twinning himself with the presidential winner as ‘Bolsodoria’.
Poetic justice. In Congress, the bandwagon is likely to roll just as
fast, deputies clambering aboard in greed or fear to give the executive,
at least to begin with, the majorities it needs. As for military
resistance to privatisation or foreign takeovers, the first of Brazil’s
generals to run the country after they seized power in 1964, Castelo
Branco, was no enemy of either. His minister of planning, later
ambassador in London, was the famously outspoken champion of free
markets and foreign capital, Roberto Campos. Bolsonaro has just
appointed Campos’s grandson head of the Central Bank. To believe the
sale of public assets will drive a wedge between Bolsonaro and his
praetorians could prove wishful thinking.
A more serious risk to the new regime lies in the unfinished business of
Lava Jato. Like the old, the new Congress is packed with recipients of
bribes, distributors of backhanders, begetters of ill-gotten fortunes,
those who’ve passed lifetimes in assiduous corruption – indeed, it has
become a sanctuary for those already in the crosshairs of the police,
who got themselves elected deputies simply to gain immunity from
prosecution. Prominent among them is Aécio, with multiple charges piling
up against him. Nor are Bolsonaro and his family in the clear,
investigators having – post-election – not only discovered suspicious
transactions in the accounts of his son Flávio, but, still more
explosively, links to an ex-captain of the military police in Rio, twice
held on charges of militia-style killings, who is implicated in the
murder of Marielle Franco, the black legislator and activist whose death
last year caused an international outcry. Can Moro as justice minister
now pass a sponge over delicts to which as a magistrate he owed his
reputation for mercilessness? Already, he has explained that the Ten
Measures against Corruption, that for years he insisted had to be passed
if the country was to be cleansed, needed ‘rethinking’: not all of them
are any longer so important. Yet to unwind the dynamic of Lava Jato
altogether would destroy his standing. Should Congress try to pass a
general amnesty for cases of corruption, a move mooted under Temer, the
stage would be set for a full-tilt conflict of powers – as it also would
if, vice versa, Moro pressed the Supreme Court to lift the immunity of
too many deputies. This is the front where the potential for combustion
is most real.
*
Holding these diverse segments of the regime together is the circle
composed of Bolsonaro himself, his offspring and immediate entourage.
Their arrival at the apex of the state marks a significant alteration in
the geography of power in Brazil. After President Getúlio Vargas shot
himself in the Catete Palace in 1954, Rio – capital of the country for
some two hundred years – lost its position as the centre of national
politics. The construction of Brasília started in 1956 and was completed
by 1960. Thereafter, presidents came from São Paulo (Janio, Cardoso,
Lula), Rio Grande do Sul (Jango), Minas (Itamar, Dilma) or the
north-east (Sarney, Collor). Demoted politically, Rio declined – at
points, some would say, rotted – economically, socially and physically.
Neither the PT nor the PSDB ever secured much of a foothold in the city,
for long stretches an ideological no man’s land, with little purchase on
national politics. This started to change with the rise of Cunha to the
helm of Congress, an archetypal Rio – carioca –figure with a pack of
monetised deputies at his beck and call. The new regime has consummated
the shift. After six decades in which Rio was marginal, power has moved
back. All three of the most important positions in the administration
are occupied by its products – Bolsonaro in the presidency, Guedes in
the Finance Ministry and the rotund fixer Rodrigo Maia in Cunha’s former
seat as Speaker of the House. In the cabinet, which for the first time
in the history of the republic contains not a single minister from the
north or the north-east, all coming from just six out of Brazil’s 26
states, the largest contingent – a quarter – are natives of Rio. It is a
signal shift.
How then is Bolsonaro to be classified? Often heard on the left in
Brazil, and in the liberal press in Europe, is the opinion that his rise
represents a contemporary version of fascism. The same, of course, is a
standard depiction of Trump in liberal and left circles in America and
the North Atlantic at large, if typically assorted with escape clauses –
‘much like’, ‘reminiscent of’, ‘resembling’ – making clear it is little
more than lazy invective.[5] The label is no more plausible in Brazil.
Fascism was a reaction to the danger of social revolution in a time of
economic dislocation or depression. It commanded dedicated cadres,
organised mass movements and possessed an articulated ideology. Brazil
had its version in the 1930s, the green-shirt Integralistas, who at
their height numbered over a million members, with an articulate leader,
Plínio Salgado, an extensive press, publishing programme and set of
cultural organisations, and who came close to seizing power in 1938,
after the failure of a communist insurrection in 1935. Nothing remotely
comparable either in terms of a danger to the established order from the
left, or of a disciplined mass force on the right, exists in Brazil
today. In 1964, there was still a major communist party, with influence
inside the armed forces, a militant trade-union movement, and growing
unrest in the countryside, under a weak president calling for radical
reforms. That was enough to provoke not fascism but a conventional
military dictatorship. In 2018, the communist party of old was long
gone, combative trade unions were a back number, the poor passive and
dispersed, the PT a mildly reforming party, for years on good terms with
big business. Breathing fire, Bolsonaro could win an election. But there
is scarcely any organisational infrastructure beneath him and no need
for any mass repression since there is no mass opposition to crush.
Is Bolsonaro better pigeonholed as a populist? The term now suffers such
inflation as the all-purpose bugbear of the bien pensant media that its
utility has declined. Undoubtedly, his posture as a valiant foe of the
establishment, and style as a rough-hewn man of the people, belong to
the repertoire of what is generally viewed as populism. Modelling
himself on the president of the US, he outdoes Trump in wrapping himself
in the national flag, and spewing a Twitter stream – 70 per cent more
tweets than the latter in his first week in office. But in the gallery
of right-wing populists today, Bolsonaro does not fit the standard bill
in at least two respects. Immigration is not an issue in Brazil, where
just 600,000 of a population of 204 million are foreign-born – 0.3 per
cent, compared with some 14 per cent in the US and UK, or 15 per cent in
Germany. Racism, of course, is an issue, to which Bolsonaro like Trump
has made covert appeals, and whose violence in the practices of the
police he will encourage. But unlike Trump, he won a large black and
pardo constituency in the polls, and is not likely to risk this by
anything approaching an equivalent of the xenophobic anti-immigrant
rhetoric in the North Atlantic. A third of his party in parliament,
indeed, is not white – a higher percentage than in the much vaunted
progressive Democratic contingent in the 116th US Congress.
A second significant difference lies in the character of Bolsonaro’s
nationalism. Brazil is not a country either afflicted or threatened by
loss of sovereignty as in the EU or by imperial decline as in the US or
UK, the two drivers of right-wing populism in the North. His patriotic
chest-beating is more factitious. Today he is no enemy of foreign
capital. His nationalism, in expression hyperbolic enough, essentially
takes the form of virulent tropes of anti-socialism, anti-feminism and
homophobia, excrescences alien to the Brazilian soul. But it has no
quarrel with free markets. In local parlance, it offers the paradox of a
populismo entreguista, a ‘supine’ populism – one in principle at least,
perfectly willing to hand over national assets to global banks and
corporations.
Comparison with Trump, Bolsonaro’s closest analogue as a politician,
indicates a different set of strengths and weaknesses. Though he comes
from a much humbler background, Bolsonaro is less illiterate. Education
in a military academy saw to that: books are not a complete mystery to
him. Aware of certain of his limitations, he lacks Trump’s degree of
egomania. Trump’s overweening confidence in himself comes not just from
a millionaire family background, but a long career of success in real
estate speculation and showbusiness. Bolsonaro, who has never run
anything in his life, has no such existential build-up. He is much less
secure. Given, like Trump, to every kind of intemperate outburst, unlike
Trump, he will quickly back off if reactions become too negative. The
first weeks of his administration have been a cacophony of conflicting
statements and retractions or denials of them.
It is not just in character, but by circumstance, that Bolsonaro is a
more brittle figure. Both he and Trump were catapulted to power
virtually overnight, against all expectation. Trump took the presidency
with a much lower percentage of the vote – 46 per cent – than
Bolsonaro’s 55 per cent majority. But his supporters are ideologically
fervent and solidly behind him, whereas Bolsonaro’s support may be
wider, but is shallower, as post-electoral polls indicating rejection of
many of his proposed policies show. Trump, moreover, came to power by
taking over one of the two great parties of the country, where Bolsonaro
won power effectively on his own, without any institutional support at
the polls. Once elected, on the other hand, he will not, because he
cannot, rule without taking account of the institutions around him, as
Trump has tried to do. This doesn’t mean he will be less brutal, since
in Brazil many of these institutions are more authoritarian than in the
US. The indigenous peoples of the Amazon are sure victims: unlike blacks
a negligible quantity at the polls, as cattle ranchers sweep across
their habitat (with long-term consequences that will not be appeased by
the dismal gestures of the Global north towards arresting climate
change), they will be the first to suffer. So too, it is easy to imagine
– especially if the economy fails to pick up and he needs to distract
attention from it – Bolsonaro cracking down viciously on student
protests; rounding up activists of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST)
or its urban equivalent, the MTST, and banning their organisations;
breaking strikes, where necessary. But jungle apart, such repression is
likely to be retail, not wholesale. More, for the minute, would be
surplus to requirements.
*
Where will that leave the PT? Far from flourishing, but so far
surviving. With 10 per cent of the vote and 11 per cent of the seats in
the Chamber of Deputies, it avoided the rout of the PSDB and PMDB. With
Lula in jail, what is likely to become of it? Here qualified opinion
divides. For Singer, the central reality of the PT years was, as the
titles of his two books make plain, lulismo – the person overshadowing
the party. For the best American scholar on contemporary Brazil, David
Samuels, it is the other way round: the deeper, more durable phenomenon
was petismo – the party rather than the person. Lula, in his view, was
not a charismatic leader like Vargas, or his heirs from Rio Grande do
Sul, João Goulart or Leonel Brizola, politicians without real roots in a
party. Nor, for that matter, unlike these figures, was he a populist.
Financially orthodox, respectful of democratic institutions, he neither
created a political system around himself, nor gave way to inflammatory
Manichaean rhetoric of ‘them’ and ‘us’. In Samuels’s reading, lulismo
itself never amounted to more than a ‘thin psychological attachment’,
compared to the PT’s organisational strength and solid racination in
civil society. Singer was wrong both to exaggerate the importance of
Lula and to attribute a generally conservative outlook to the poor,
offset by a special investment in him. In 2014, Samuels and his
Brazilian colleague Cesar Zucco could write: ‘Peering into our crystal
ball, we see the PT as the fulcrum of Brazil’s party system. Without it,
governance will be difficult’.[6]
Singer’s predictions have worn better. Events have shown that his sense
of the mentality of the dispossessed, their fear of disorder and anxious
desire for stability, was accurate. In their clairvoyance, many pages
from his Os Sentidos do lulismo (2012), noting the precedents of Collor
and Jânio Quadros, read like a scenario for Bolsonaro’s triumph in
popular zones of Brazil six years later. What has this meant for the
relations between the PT and its leader since? On the eve of his
imprisonment, an interviewer remarked to Lula: ‘There are those who say
that the problem in Brazil is that it never knew a war, a rupture.’ His
answer was: ‘I agree. It’s funny the way each time Brazil was on the
verge of a rupture, there was an agreement. An agreement reached from
above. Those who are above never want to leave.’ The reply is revealing:
what it excludes is the possibility that those above might want a
rupture – a break from the right, not the left. Yet this is effectively
what hit the PT in 2016-18, something with which it has yet to come to
terms. In power, so long as the going was good, the PT benefited the
poor; but it neither educated nor mobilised them. Its enemies,
meanwhile, not only mobilised but educated themselves, up to the latest
postmodern standards. The result was a one-sided class war. The huge
demonstrations that ended by toppling Dilma were the outcome of a
galvanisation of the middle class such as Brazil had never witnessed;
enabled by a mastery of social media, transmitted from its youth to
Bolsonaro, reflecting a transformation of the country little short of a
social revolution. Between 2014 and 2018, despite the recession, the
number of smartphones surpassed the number of inhabitants, and their use
would put any other political deployment of them, in Europe or America,
in the shade.
That, of course, was not the only lethal reality the PT failed to
recognise. In office, it had rejected mobilisation in favour of
co-option; and co-option – of the Brazilian political and business class
– meant corruption. That was in the logic of its strategic choice in
office. ‘Between consent and force stands corruption,’ Gramsci wrote,
‘which is characteristic of situations when it is hard to exercise the
hegemonic function and the use of force is too risky.’ Renouncing
hegemony, which required a sustained effort of popular enlightenment and
collective organisation, and refusing coercion, towards which it never
felt any temptation, the party was left with corruption. To its leaders,
anything else seemed too hard or too risky. Corruption was the price of
its ‘weak reformism’, in Singer’s phrase, and the real benefits it made
possible. But once it was exposed, the party could find no words to name
and criticise what it had done. Instead, in an all too revealing – in
its way, disastrously accurate – euphemism, the PT explained that it
needed to ‘overcome its adaptation to the modus vivendi of traditional
Brazilian politics’. Modus vivendi: a way of living together – just so.
Resort to euphemisms offers no escape from a past to which the PT
remains fettered, in the most painful and paralysing way. Lava Jato is
far from finished with its star victim. Lula’s sentence of 12 years for
his inspection of a beachfront condominium is just the beginning. A
second trial on a similar charge – employing a construction firm that
had received governmental contracts while he was in office for
improvements to a friend’s rural retreat – is nearing conclusion, with a
similar verdict in view. These charges are still, in the sum of things,
relatively trivial, though the sentences are not. Coming down the pike,
however, are far more serious accusations, not of private dereliction,
but malversation of huge sums of public money – hundreds of millions of
dollars at the disposal of Petrobras when Lula was president – based on
the rewarded testimony of the leading Judas of the party, his one-time
right-hand man, the former finance minister Antonio Palocci, at present
selling himself as a witness on yet further cases for prosecution. The
government will ensure maximum publicity for the mega-trials to come. It
needs to finish off Lula.
The PT, and its sympathisers, deeply and understandably angered at the
lack of commutative justice with which Lula’s personal affairs have been
handled, are likely to have to confront evidence, however tainted,
potentially far more damaging, in what threatens to be an indefinitely
extended process to discredit and confine, for life, the former
president. How is the party to react? Lula, who has not been diminished
in prison, remains its overwhelmingly most important political asset;
yet now one in danger of becoming, for many, almost equally a liability.
To do him historical justice seems beyond its powers. The party depends
on him for steady leadership, but risks forfeiting credibility if it
doesn’t become independent of him. Anchor or albatross? If Lula were
fully abstracted from the scene, many think the PT would rapidly split.
In such an impasse, militants may well be driven to hope that under
Bolsonaro conditions in Brazil worsen so much that few will any longer
care about the venial scandals of the past, their traces obliterated in
some vaster upheaval to come.
For a dozen years, Brazil was the only major country in the world to
defy the epoch, to refuse the deepening of the neoliberal regime of
capital and relax some of its rigours in favour of the least well-off.
Whether the experience had to end as it did is imponderable. The masses
were not called to defend what they had gained. Did the centuries of
slavery that set the country apart from the rest of Latin America make
popular passivity insuperable, the PT’s modus vivendi the best that
could be done? At times, Singer has implied something like this. At
others, he is more stringent. Brazil, he recently wrote, has failed to
achieve the social inclusion of all its citizens that was the task of
the generation after the dictatorship. But in its absence, no other
projects are viable. In a slightly more optimistic vein, another acute
observer, a little to his right, Celso Rocha de Barros, has remarked
that lulismo will not be finished in Brazil until something better
replaces it. One must hope these judgments hold good. But memories can
fade, and elsewhere, social exclusion has proved only too cruelly
viable. The left has always been inclined to make predictions of its
preferences. It would be an error to count on defeat self-correcting
itself with time.
[1] ‘Considerações sobre a operação Mani Pulite’ (Revista CEJ 26,
July-September 2004).
[2] Companhia das Letras, 392 pp., £11.50, May 2018, 978 8 535 93115 0.
[3] ‘Na prática, ministros do STF agridem a democracia’ (Ilustríssima,
28 January 2018): much the best portrait of the current court.
[4] Boitempo, 216 pp., £15, March 2018, 978 8 575 59621 0
[5] For a comprehensive demolition of the label, and the literature
surrounding it, see Dylan Riley, ‘What is Trump?’, New Left Review
114,pp. 5-31.
[6] ‘Lulismo, Petismo, and the Future of Brazilian Politics’, Journal of
Politics in Latin America 3, where lulismo is contrasted with peronismo.
For reiterated dissent from Singer, see their Partisans, Antipartisans,
Nonpartisans: Voting Behaviour in Brazil (Cambridge, 196 pp., £75, May
2018, 978 1 108 42888 0).
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